Doom IOS Source Port

I'm trying to find a good doom source port that can run stuff like Hexen and wads and pk3s for the iOS does anyone know of any?

pk3 (mostly) implies zdoom. ATM there is no released port of zdoom for iOS, nor is there a (standalone) port of hexen AFAIK. Beloko Games, who made the excellent D-Touch package for Android including Chocolate Doom, PrBoom-Plus and GZDoom, is in the process of porting GZDoom to iOS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TQDQ3qV640. Unfortunately no new information on that port has been released since then...

There are two ways to play Doom on iOS. Doom Classic and Gameception. Gameception is forked from Doom Classic and is easier to use different iwads and pwads, but uses and olderverion of the Doom Classic code. Doom Classic AFAIK can only play doom.wad out of the box, but if you are willing, the source code for the latest Doom Classic is found below.

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-IOS2

If you have a jailbroken iOS device, you can get RetroArch which, unless I'm mistaken, has PrBoom. That's probably the most advanced source port actually on iOS, not up to ZDoom level though.

I also wonder whether Apple would approve such an app. They definitely had some issues in the past with apps that allow custom content and my former employer suffered several rejections because of that, to the point that everything that could be loaded had to be at least declared in the original submission.

Also, if your app contains a scripting host/VM of any sorts, you can forget it (unless they relaxed that clause). In the past, they rejected games which adopted the split "low level engine + scripting for gameplay" architecture, which today means pretty much anything. At least stuff like Puzzle Quest and (I think) Angry Birds needed special "no scripting" versions at some point, at least until Apple (post-2010) allowed for scripting engines within apps, provided all scripting content was embedded in the app and verified by Apple.

Of course, this pretty much means no ZDoom addons levels containing scripting (who knows if they consider plain old PWADs "scripting"...maybe Apple requires to verify each of them, to make sure they don't crash, and only accept them as DLC packages).

Are you sure?

Seems like RetroArch works on non jailbroken devices.

Graf Zahl said:

I also wonder whether Apple would approve such an app. They definitely had some issues in the past with apps that allow custom content and my former employer suffered several rejections because of that, to the point that everything that could be loaded had to be at least declared in the original submission.

They removed a Dosbox app simply because it would allow you read access to source files. Not WRITE access mind you, read access, as in you'd only be able to look at them. Apple's pretty paranoid. Not that WAD files would exactly allow much in terms of exploitations on the system itself but you know how paranoia is.

Guess why I don't buy Apple product.

I don't need some paranoid jerk sitting somewhere on the other side of the world telling me what I can and what I can't do with my device.

@Maes: I never experienced that they outright rejected something that used scripting internally. But Apple are truly dead set against anything they cannot verify because it just might tear down the wall around their walled garden.

Ditto, I only have an iPhone 5 because I was given one free of charge and only use it because it has a better screen resolution, graphics chip, and far better camera than my budget Android device. The only way you can really get any kind of freedom on the device is to jailbreak it, something Apple will fight tooth and nail to try to prevent.

Graf Zahl said:

@Maes: I never experienced that they outright rejected something that used scripting internally. But Apple are truly dead set against anything they cannot verify because it just might tear down the wall around their walled garden.

I know for sure the story behind Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords because I used to have some contacts at I2 at the time, due to an older project I took part in. This also accounts for the very late release of the iOS port of the game compared to all others.

In their case, Apple's official story was that using Lua scripting for driving the story/gameplay aspects of the game, would result in performance issues/inefficiencies. The workaround was for I2 to precompile all Lua scripts and link them into the executable, just to please Apple's policies. Not judging whether Apple had a point there, or if the real reason was more paranoia/pettiness-induced.

Of course, since then (2008), things may have changed and nobody's required to go to such extremes anymore.

Ok, that was before my experiences with them.

I only can remember that we had to pre-include all potentially usable parts of one large minigame collection project do get it through submission.

In later submissions we tricked them a bit by declaring that the app would become too large so we had to download the single games' resources as-needed - which included all the scripts in obfuscated form. But there was no way Apple would allow unapproved updates of the game scripts (which was done under the hand anyway, they never noticed because there was no clearly recognizable code, the download packages were a custom archive format, you may guess the reason why we did not use standard Zip... :D)

But the example you cite would have hurt the iPhone's prospects had they stuck to it. That's clearly the best imaginable way to kill any momentum for a rising platform and I guess they realized this themselves very, very quickly.

One thing that has also hurt Apple was the fact that you pretty much needed a Mac along with Mac OS X just to develop programs for their phones, that has changed however. One thing that has made Android so popular is that you could develop programs for it from any system and the lax store rules meant that it was far easier to get applications. Sure a large number of applications were low quality, but the high quality ones really shined through.

Graf Zahl said:

I don't need some paranoid jerk sitting somewhere on the other side of the world telling me what I can and what I can't do with my device.

You cannot throw your communication device into the blackhole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy, you can however throw it on a soft surface such as a bed.

GhostlyDeath said:

One thing that has also hurt Apple was the fact that you pretty much needed a Mac along with Mac OS X just to develop programs for their phones, that has changed however. One thing that has made Android so popular is that you could develop programs for it from any system and the lax store rules meant that it was far easier to get applications. Sure a large number of applications were low quality, but the high quality ones really shined through.

You can now develop iOS apps without a Mac? Because that would be news to me. Last I checked, you still required a Mac.

You cannot compile iOS apps without a Mac, but there's many development frameworks out there that allow doing most work on a different system and using the Mac only for actual compilation, allowing to share it between multiple developers.

True, Unity is one of them. You could build an entire game then export it as an XCode Project. You don't even need the other person to have Unity, just give them the XCode Project Unity spits out and have them compile it from there.